Backing up your Motorola Milestone/Droid using nandroid

Preperation

Prerequisites:

• your phone has to be rooted
• USB drivers installed on your Windows machine
• the Android SDK
• charge your phone to 100% otherwise you can get into serious troubles
• ADBRecovery.zip

Then…

• Extract ADBRecovery.zip
• everything in the folder “in_sd_root” has to be moved to the root of your SD card. Make sure you do *not* move the folder “in_sd_root” itself, just the content inside the folder
• Boot your phone into recovery mode:
  • shut down your phone
  • turn it on, while holding down the camera-button
  • wait until you see the triangle on the screen
  • release the camera button
  • press down the volume-up button, hold it pressed and press the camera button
  • your phone should now show you that it is in recovery mode
• Use the DPAD to  scroll down to apply sdcard:update.zip, press the golden button
• Connect your phone with the help of a USB cable to your computer
• Open the command box on your Windows computer
• Change into the folder where the SDK has been installed, e.g.
  cd "c:\program files\android-sdk_r05\tools\"
• enter:
  adb shell

Now we’re ready to create a backup/recover a backup.

Backup

Enter:

nandroid-mobile.sh --backup

Now enter a name for your backup and press enter. If you want to list your content using ls, don’t forget to use alias ls=’ls –color=never’ .  The backups will be stored in /sdcard/nandroid/console=ttyS2,115200n8 in a subfolder, prefixed with the name you have just supplied. The backup consists of multiple files!

Don’t forget to move these files off your SD card to a save place

Recovery

Enter:

nandroid-mobile.sh --restore

If only one backup is available it will automatically proceed to recover your backup, otherwise you have to enter the complete and full name of your backup.

Further information including other commandline options for nandroid incl. backup/recovery of partial data/drives please read here.